Ars readers pick the 12 most incredible webcomics

We listed our favorites, then you gave us 120+ of yours.

Last Friday, we nominated our favorite webcomics and asked you to recommend yours. Boy, did Ars readers deliver. Approximately 123 unique recommendations later, we're culling the best and most recommended comics into a handy list for your perusal. There's a lot our original list missed, and because we can't list all 123 recommendations here, we'll inevitably miss a lot more in this follow-up. But here are some overwhelmingly reader-approved webcomics that you'll want to check out (if you haven't done so already.)

Shlock Mercenary

If ever there was an exercise in dedication, it appears to be embodied by the creator of Schlock Mercenary. Cervus got into the comments early to tell us "No Schlock Mercenary? I am disappoint. Hard scifi webcomic, updated without missing a day since June of 2000. Nominated for the Hugo several times (lost to Girl Genius on all of them)." abj21 agreed, saying, "This. Schlock is by far my favorite webcomic. I have been reading it daily for over a decade."

"[N]ot only is it hard scifi with strong story arcs, it manages to bring the funny nearly every day," wrote swilhelm. And reader davolfman gives us the reason behind his respect for the comic: "I think Schlock Mercenary should be on any list. It is probably by far the most professional webcomic out there with an artist who supports a family now and does what it takes to have a daily comic for more than a decade straight without interruption. He didn't start with any talent, just a plan to do it right and has stuck with it while the art improved."

The comic is character-driven, so it will be hard for readers to just pick up at the beginning and go from there. Although, if you don't have the time to digest the 4,600+ entries that Howard Tayler has penned, it's easy enough to get a feel for the characters if you pick up somewhere in the middle.

Questionable Content

Questionable Content from Jeph Jacques "won" in our comments section, garnering 12 mentions from 150+ comments and at least a billion upvotes for those comments that mentioned QC. maeltor offered glowing praise: "+1 for QC!!! Have been reading that near every damn day for a few years now. When I first started, he was a few years in, so I sat and read from start to finish. It's very cool how you can see how his artwork abilities have improved for the years. He's a good Twitter source of funny as well."

"Jeph's done a great job of making a comic and characters that you love following day after day," wrote DrHogie. "I'm a HUGE fan of QC as well. Definitely a winner there too," replied H2O rip. The irreverent and sometimes absurd comic made many of our readers' "Check Every Day" lists, and will appeal to anyone who cares "about romance, indie rock, little robots, and the problems people have," according to the website. If you fit in any of those broad categories, you'll want to check this comic out.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

Written and drawn by Christopher Hastings, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja was a crowd favorite for the whimsical and hilarious characters. "I never know what is coming in Dr McNinja," said reflex-croft. "Where's Dr. McNinja?" Caedus asked. "I'm guessing he's here lurking somewhere in the article but we can't see him. Because he's a ninja. And a Doctor."

The comic, which is laid out in a series of "issues" that the reader can select from a drop-down menu, is easier to pick up than other long-running comic with character arcs because of its segmented style. The omission of Dr. McNinja from the original list caused incredulity among readers, with Tamsen saying, "enderandrew and probably others have pointed out that you've missed Dr. McNinja. Criminal, absolutely criminal!"

Achewood

Achewood is another Internet-old comic. Created by Chris Onstad, the comic has been running since 2001. "I mean... I guess that this is a good look at what's out there currently, but a list without Achewood feels entirely incomplete. It was a cornerstone in the founding days of webcomics and, in my opinion, nothing else in the medium has come close to the Great Outdoor Fight arc," wrote jimbles. Editor Patrick Miller at Game Developer Magazine messaged us to vote for Achewood, and also suggested we start at Great Outdoor Fight and read from there.

Achewood isn't for everyone though. enderandrew said he used to be a reader, but no longer. "I read Achewood for a really long time, and it was occasionally brilliant, but often but bizarre and nonsensical. If I don't care for the characters in long-form story, and you're not consistently funny, then I won't keep reading."

Girl Genius

"Questionable Content and Girl Genius are the only story arc comics I can be bothered to follow anymore," wrote skyywise. Indeed, many Ars readers felt that way, as Girl Genius came in a close second to Questionable Content in mentions and in comment upvotes.

"An intricate storyline and I don't know how they can turn out 3 full color pages a week," wrote randomjoe. The well-done art and the sci-fi adventure storyline both got mad props from our commenters. Nekojin gave us the backstory: "A comic by Phil Foglio that originally started as a standard 'dead-tree' comic, and changed into a webcomic when they had some difficulties with publishing the monthly title. Being freed from the constraints of the standard page layout has resulted in some truly fabulous strips (even though most pages still adhere to that format)."

The Perry Bible Fellowship

This webcomic was a favorite among our readers, although it's no longer updated regularly. The Perry Bible Fellowship is usually only three or four panels long, so it's short compared to others we've mentioned, but those few inches of content are heavy on irreverence.

"Though it's been on hiatus for a while, The Perry Bible Fellowship (occasionally NSFW) probably deserves to be mentioned in this context. Though it started in print, it gained much fame as a web comic. Not the best choice for those who are easily offended, but it was consistently clever and very well drawn," wrote mrCharlie

"I also miss the Perry Bible Fellowship," lamented HitScan. But regular updates are not a requirement for making this list, so if sometimes-surreal humor is your style, be sure to check out the archives.

I don't think the new "Players" storyline was intended to create (or answer) any questions. The Players have appeared in previous strips before, and they were always more unrealistic and cartoony than Ethan and the other former characters. Their origins and whatnot are unimportant; they're just characters who like video games.Personally I think it's an improvement (or maybe I just like this particular strip because I'm not a fan of Apple products)

Just because something isn't intended to ask or answer questions, doesn't mean they don't exist.

And the Players are just as much ultra-violent, retarded monkey cheese "humor" based as Ethan and the other characters were.

By the way, any webcomic that doesn't let me click on the image to advance to the next strip is right out.If I have to find a "next" link that moves to a different spot on the page with each strip, I get very frustrated.

No order of the stick? All the other comics I regularly read have been pretty much covered, but I'm surprised considering Ars readership that not more like it. Anybody who's played D&D for hours on time should probably enjoy that one.

There were a couple of mentions in the comments of the previous article, but not enough to get listed here, I guess. Today's comic is the first new one in about 3 months (since Rich injured his hand), so maybe that has something to do with it. OotS still gets my vote, though.

The whole "Players" "storyline" is contrived bullcrap. It creates far more questions than it answers. And there's the whole issue with loss.jpg and killing of Lilah. Tim can't make up his mind if the strip should be stupid "funny" or serious.

If he does reboot the main characters, is he going to white wash those scenes away when dealing with those characters? Is Lilah still going to be a subservient doormat for Ethan? There are a billion other questions that can be used as genuine criticism against the comic and Tim is unwilling to listen to said criticism. (By banning any and all from his forums, leaving a collection of suck-ups and sycophants who think that Tim can do no wrong.)

I can't disagree with that. I wish he'd keep the major points of Ethan and Lilah's relationship, for example their dating and how he proposed to her ("Top Score", probably one of my favorite CAD strips) but flush out Lilah more as well as give Lucas more than a woman of the week. Maybe give Lucas more time with a real relationship sooner and not have it as a sideline. Especially no more gag relationships like the woman who dated who tried to rob and kill him.

In terms of Tim's interpersonal skills, I met him at Digital Overload the first and only time I went there when it was in Rhode Island. I'm limited in what I can get away with saying here but self centered egotistical jackass wouldn't be taking it too far.

Can I suggest an article specifically for comics that used to be great but were given a major stroke or otherwise severely maimed by their creator(s)?

I'd suggest Megatokyo for the top of that list followed by CAD. The former was good back when Largo (Rodney Caston) wrote all the scripts and I dare say he at least kept Piro (Fred Gallagher) in the line of sanity when it came to the drawings. Now of course it's a mess and the stories, such as they are, are nonsensical.

CAD, despite the egomania of its creator and his penchant in the early days for random visual gags had a good story at the start and despite getting occasionally sidetracked had a generally clear flow. This compared to later (I'd generally say it started going down-hill right before the wedding and especially post wedding) when there were the huge sidetracked story lines including the three (I think it was three) choose your own adventure stories.

The only exception I'd lay out to the sidetracked storylines being bad were the Wintereesmas storylines and especially the Games Games Bowl which put the Hunger Games to shame. Those were only once a year and were good escapes from the main story, especially as the story went downhill to outright absurd.

The whole "Players" "storyline" is contrived bullcrap. It creates far more questions than it answers. And there's the whole issue with loss.jpg and killing of Lilah. Tim can't make up his mind if the strip should be stupid "funny" or serious.

If he does reboot the main characters, is he going to white wash those scenes away when dealing with those characters? Is Lilah still going to be a subservient doormat for Ethan? There are a billion other questions that can be used as genuine criticism against the comic and Tim is unwilling to listen to said criticism. (By banning any and all from his forums, leaving a collection of suck-ups and sycophants who think that Tim can do no wrong.)

I can't disagree with that. I wish he'd keep the major points of Ethan and Lilah's relationship, for example their dating and how he proposed to her ("Top Score", probably one of my favorite CAD strips) but flush out Lilah more as well as give Lucas more than a woman of the week. Maybe give Lucas more time with a real relationship sooner and not have it as a sideline. Especially no more gag relationships like the woman who dated who tried to rob and kill him.

In terms of Tim's interpersonal skills, I met him at Digital Overload the first and only time I went there when it was in Rhode Island. I'm limited in what I can get away with saying here but self centered egotistical jackass wouldn't be taking it too far.

Personally, Tim should just stop. CAD is just awful no matter how you look at it. Let's just take Ethan, for example, and even ignore the whole Mary Sue aspect of the character. He's supposedly smart enough to invent a robot with functioning AI out of an Xbox, yet is this retarded man child that can barely function in every other aspect of life. How do the other characters put up with his waaaaaaacky monkey cheese antics; or further yet, why would anyone want to marry someone like that!?

If I’m not mistaken, the picture used for Dr. McNinja was a guest comic.

It is and if I'm not mistaken the guest artist was Fred Grisolm/Ed Brisson who did the late great webcomic "Hate Song", which frequently made the list of most offensive comic (to Fred/Ed's frequent chagrin).

Just because something isn't intended to ask or answer questions, doesn't mean they don't exist.

And the Players are just as much ultra-violent, retarded monkey cheese "humor" based as Ethan and the other characters were.

Know what the big refresh was? Five fingers instead of four. FIVE!

Meh. If you mean questions like "where did the players come from" or "what do they do for a living", those things don't really matter. It's just a comic strip, and if it needs to delve into those types of things, it will, but for the most part those are irrelevant.

Anyway, what's so bad about violent monkey humor? One of the biggest things the comic did wrong was trying to go for more "serious" story arcs (like that awful miscarriage storyline). In fact, CAD first started with that type of crazy humor but moved away from it over time, and just became a bunch of talking heads.Now that those characters are gone, it looks like CAD is moving away from realism and going back to its cartoony, violence-filled roots.

It bounces around a lot, not really arc driven, but with some recurring characters, the artwork is very fun, and it swings between different moods fairly often. The strips are too big to embed, but these are two good ones:

Just because something isn't intended to ask or answer questions, doesn't mean they don't exist.

And the Players are just as much ultra-violent, retarded monkey cheese "humor" based as Ethan and the other characters were.

Know what the big refresh was? Five fingers instead of four. FIVE!

Meh. If you mean questions like "where did the players come from" or "what do they do for a living", those things don't really matter. It's just a comic strip, and if it needs to delve into those types of things, it will, but for the most part those are irrelevant.

Anyway, what's so bad about violent monkey humor? One of the biggest things the comic did wrong was trying to go for more "serious" story arcs (like that awful miscarriage storyline). In fact, CAD first started with that type of crazy humor but moved away from it over time, and just became a bunch of talking heads.Now that those characters are gone, it looks like CAD is moving away from realism and going back to its cartoony, violence-filled roots.

Because Tim Buckley is ham handed, and other comics do the monkey cheese style of humor far better than CAD could ever pull off. Plus it's not cartoonishly violent. It's overly so.

This is down-right psychotic.

And loss.jpg was the pièce de résistance of CAD and Tim will never, ever reach that type of success ever again.

Welp, I was going to mention Lackadaisy and The Abominable Charles Christopher as, in my opinion, the most well drawn comics I've ever seen, even counting print comics, but that's been done. So I'll just throw chainsawsuit and Gun Show as my favorite wacky strips. I'd include Nobody Scores!, but it appears that Brandon Bolt has come to loathe drawing webcomics and thus has been out of it for a year. Literally. Oh well.

I only thought Oglaf and the control-alt-delete comics above were remotely funny. It's late, so I may not be able to describe what I mean clearly:

All of these comics suffer from what I call "unfortunate nerd humor" where the "humor" is to make a reference to something nerdy and to dutifully pay homage to nerd tropes. I work with too many people who have this style of "humor," and it comes off like they are running an algorithm to tell jokes. It's really sad to see this happen.

The one webcomic that I like a lot of the times is penny-arcade. I don't really get the ones that are too deep into game references, though. Otherwise, it's pretty clever i think.

The one comic I hate is Megatokyo. For some reason, I read it for a while around 10 years ago, then the co-creator quit and it became some third rate japanese comic wannabe that was poorly produced. I still wonder how this guy made a living off of it.

This will probably get buried, but, this is a pretty new web-comic that details the life of Drew, a working class man who is one of a rare few that are allergic to pills that removes the need to sleep: http://www.powernapcomic.com/d/20110617.htmlSounds absurd? Sure, but the comic is really well drawn, is witty and is updated quite frequently. Quite possibly one of my favorite comics